The Modern Career Guidelines
These books will help us pave our way for the next job search
Some of us may be more fortunate enough because we have found what we want to do with our lives and even luckier, also good at what we already do. But some of us, including me, have confusion about how to find it and further — having confusion in navigating our careers.
This month, I have a chance to read two books that explain most of the career questions that stuck in my head — the first book is Do Over by Jon Acuff and the second one is So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport. Acuff discusses how to navigate our career in general, while Newport’s book specifically addressed how to avoid the passion trap in the career searching journey. Although a bit different, both of these authors point out some important things that I think will benefit us in the long run, if we apply those in real life.
I will share the learnings about these two books from my point of view and provide the rating and opinion at the end of the article.
Try Out New Things
Trying out something new can be scary sometimes. I also feel the same way! We back away sometimes because we feel we’re not capable of it.
Acuff gave us an idea of how to pick skills we want to learn — through necessity or curiosity. By necessity, it means we need to pick skills based on our current job, while learning based on curiosity might be something that unrelated at all to what we do for a living. Anyway, everybody has a preference for this, but I will choose to learn something out of curiosity. Why? Because it won’t feel like an obligation. The most important thing for me is to train myself on how to grow the habit to learn consistently.
Another thing to note is finding ways to try things that will generate results. Just like a science experiment, there is no right or wrong, we just need to test our hypotheses. In his book, Newport wrote a term called “little bets”. It’s an activity where we make experiments to get some feedback about the result. Our findings then will show, whether this action is worth pursuing or not.
If you find it confusing on what to try, maybe you can start by joining some volunteer works, choose the field that really interests you, and then decide whether it is aligned with your values and goals in life. Finding something you like or you’re capable of will still only a ‘written goal’ if you don’t try it. Give it a shot and you will know whether it’s good for you or not!
Add Up And Hone Our Skills
I remember looking at some job requirements in finance and it’s written that the candidate should be proficient in SQL (Structured Query Language). I’m like… what’s that? When I look it up, it’s a language that can facilitate us to retrieve specific information from the database. At that time I was thinking, why does a finance person need to have a specific skill in IT? After contemplating a lot, I guess the answer might be because the world is always changing. Someone who works in finance nowadays also deals with a great amount of data, that’s why they need to start upgrading their skills related to data processing.
“Careers are only difficult because they are constantly changing and we’re not.” (Jon Acuff)
As pointed out by Newport, acquiring skills that are rare and valuable, will add our brand value in the job market. If we want to stay in the business, we need to keep our skills updated, or else we will be replaced by someone else.
“…it’s important to adopt the craftsman mindset, where you focus on what value you’re offering the world” (Cal Newport)
Don’t forget to keep honing our existing skills through deliberate practice, balancing between doing the practical work and studying the concept, while also looking for feedback for improvements.
Find Our Pace
I used to think the best way to do everything is to speed up. Juggling with daily tasks is not an easy thing to do, especially when we’re handling many at once; work, family, etc. That’s why we need to set our priorities, so we will have control of what we value in our life.
One key takeaway that I can highlight from Acuff’s book, it is important to be aware of what kind of season are we in now. For example, when we are at the beginning of our career, we may find ourselves caught up at work for 80% of our time. However, as we decided to build a family, our priority will shift to nurturing our child first, for example. That means we need to slow down at work and focus more on our family.
I think we need to learn to develop our awareness related to this, or else we will get trapped in life based on other people’s standards. We are the ones, who know ourselves best. Through awareness, we can make the decision, when will be the best time to pause and to continue the journey.
Maintain Good Relationship
In the relation to navigating our career, there two ways that we can do to maintain a good relationship with our acquaintances — looking for advocates and finding a community that can support our goals.
By having an advocate, we get sort of a guideline in terms of navigating our career. Advocates are people who can help us shape our careers by providing advice on how to improve ourselves. As quoted from Acuff, “ask advocates for the cheat codes!”. For someone who has more experience than us, they know how to handle things in a certain way and that is the piece of advice that we need. We may need more than one advocate throughout our career journey based on three categories; someone who is an expert in the same field as us, someone who has different expertise than us, and someone who knows us well.
The other advice is to find our community. If you don’t know where to start, you can always start small. Informal networking works well for me, like initiating a meet up with former colleagues or even joining a small discussion group online to expand my connections. We are a social being, we need to feel that we belong to a community to feel welcome and appreciated.
Character Is What Define Us
Building our character will be one of the great investments that we can do for ourselves because. In my opinion, this is the one thing that can show who we are as a person. I want to share one of the quotes from Do Over that I really like.
“Want to see who had character and who didn’t? Attend a funeral. The proof is usually seen in who attends and what is said… Your character and what you did with it will determine that more than anything else in your life” (Jon Acuff)
According to the book, the main traits that we can train, to be seen as a person with character, including being generous, being honest, showing empathy, and being able to be present (which is very rare nowadays, due to the tendency to be always online on our gadgets). Remember, technical skills can always be taught, but changing an attitude needs to come from ourselves. It can be quite a long hard process because you need to build it as a habit. So start from small steps now!
Overall, I think these two books will be very useful not only for recent graduates, who are ready to experience their first job but also for professionals who are ready for their next career journey. I rated both of the books 4 out of 5 stars because of the complete information and easy explanation. While I think Newport’s book is somewhat a bit rigid compare to Acuff’s, but I think both have done a great job in elaborating what are the important things to do in terms of navigating our career.
Remember, in every success, there will be a long process and huge effort behind it. Keep being persistent and patient throughout the journey!
